Song for Tomorrow

What is there left to say when every day of existence is the grayscale of a wall that can only be chiseled away piece by steady piece? Where is that beauty so quietly hidden, by what means can it become manifest? Is it enough, this promise of a brighter day that comes in vacation segments, this savings accumulation that is someday to be spent carefully and considerately on future investments?

But there is no easy way to develop. This chiseling, this restrained practice of focused everyday yearning for the distant sky, is perhaps the only way to truly know how to feel the sun on one’s skin when it finally breaks through, momentarily, at an angle sweeping out through the morning chill. Everyone is sleeping in various states of shuttered despair, afraid to open themselves up to the effort required to grow. There is no easy way to get what we need. We fight each other, we fight ourselves, what is the difference?

I know that I had been hiding, tucked away in my sheltered enclave, where I could save and then spend, surrounded by my comforting stuff and people who comforted me to be comfortable themselves. Now the only shelter I’ve got lies within my skin, a formation of my bones, the portals of my eyes the sole conveyers of the world so reversibly different from what is captured without. That doesn’t make any sense, but it sounds good, so I’ll leave it be. There is no easy retreat from the challenges of the everyday world anymore. Escape has become recognizable now as what it is: a distant metaphor for death. Life consists in confrontation, struggle, adaptation, mitigation. The diplomatic conveyers of my heart are my hands and my feet. Words fail me, they fall far short of capturing anything but a residual complaint. As I await some space of inspiration to befall me, my body becomes that chiseled wall against the world. Peace by steady peace, the struggle is ever ongoing. To struggle against myself, or to struggle within the world, what is the difference? The inner regalia of bereft desire is seeded carefully into the sewn pockets of each moment, barely acknowledged, the dropping drip flooding of particulate divinity parseled into the lines that encode a face, turned so swiftly into a smile upon another’s reckoning. Smile for me, strange face of the day, that I may sleepingly move into tomorrow.